Karen Knows the Names

May 24, 2017
Morning

Then I move forward again, very softly, because the hawk is listening.  Slowly the dusk begins to uncoil.
-J. A. Baker, The Peregrine


Tomorrow is her birthday and we are having an early celebration walking in our matched green rubber boots through the oh-so-rare experience of water overflowing the river trails.  There are places now where the smell of standing water is a sour note but the overall joy the inner child feels mucking around in this mud adventure is so worth over-riding the scent.  When we can no longer navigate the bog and the mosquitos we turn back onto a dry trail and find ourselves parallel to the river's edge.  I know there really is no edge, it is always a shifting line but this year the boundary between sandy shore and water is remarkable.  I have heard the myth of a floodplain along the Rio Grande, yet, this is the first spring I have actually experienced it.
     The forest seems more alive, teeming with all sorts of birds.  A summer tanager greets us before we get out of my vehicle, as if to say, "welcome".  There are so many crested wax-wings singing that we think it sounds quite like a chorus of crickets.  Karen knows the names of each bird.  A beautiful grosbeak perches for me while I observe him through K's binoculars. Later she points out a chat, a bright yellow breasted bird that has a perfectly drawn black line of feathers from beak to eye.
     A dark flurry of movement, a quick peripheral encounter-we have startled something and we are unsettled by it.  To our left a Sharp-shinned hawk has flown up, up from the forest floor with prey in it's beak and lands precisely at the top of a dead tree trunk.  Standing on the broken pedestal-like form, the protagonist pauses and checks us out below; then we know for certain, it is a hawk. In a moment, it moves higher, crosses above us with prey in mouth into the crook of a substantial branch, partly but not entirely hidden from our view.  Karen and I take turns with her binoculars sighting the details as he or she begins to pull feathers from the crown of a small light-headed bird with a long beak. I cannot tell what bird it is, only their two heads are visible from where we stand below.  When hawk pulls up from his near-focus, we see it's soft, light tawny breast in contrast to it's dark grey wing feathers. It is riveting to witness.  A pure spectacle of nature.
     He sees us looking up but is most intent on feeding and must feel safe being so far above us, maybe twenty-five feet.  A woodpecker in the vicinity makes a noisy warning call while a mourning dove is quiet on the ground in front of us, until we pass by.  Karen thinks she is most likely aware the hawk is above her.  And I consider later,  that she may have witnessed more of the initial event than we did.  
     Shortly we continue to walk on and observe the feeding hawk from behind for a moment. I already feel changed forever. Because I reside in the city, having this wildness only ten minutes away gives it even more depth of meaning.  This is my first encounter with a hunting hawk from such a close vantage point and I cannot dismiss the synchronicity that I am in the midst of a book, The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker about the hunting habits of falcons along the seacoast of England in the 1960s. This feels like stepping into the book, or a slip down the rabbit hole of heightened awareness.

On route to meet Karen in the morning, I am just about to put a new CD into the player when I hear the captivating voice of David Krakauer from the Santa Fe Institute on the radio.  He is speaking on the limits of Science in the area of mathematical predictability. One of the many interesting points he makes about the limits of Science and Mathematics has to do with behavior and observation. He stated that some of the most important problems in mathematics are undecidable. We are pretty good at predictability for big orbits of large planets but with complex systems like the human brain, not as good at predicting behavior.
     We now know that what one observes is more or less influenced by the observer depending on scale. So observing a single cell in a petri dish may in fact change the outcome of the experiment, but does that apply to a human being observing a hawk in a tree?  At the end of the day, I am still pondering the hawk sighting in my mind and the absolute spectacle of this life on earth; all of the amazing interactions of earth's forms we rarely get to see but are happening around us all the time. Krakauer says that Science and Mathematics' ability to predict are limited by resources.  That one could never have enough resources to decide with certainty whether a butterfly flapping it's wings in one part of the world effects an event happening on the other side of the world. But theoretically, at least, we think it does.
     An ever interesting question: does the hawk or the butterfly flapping it's wings effect change? How could it not?  If we effect change by observation and a hawk effects change by killing it's daily prey, then I believe all this must be more than theory.  We cannot answer with the tools of decidability, but today, this hawk definitely effected Karen and me.  In the realm of the spiritual, where I believe all things are connected, it touched my heart and soul.  And moreover, if everything is a lightwave at the sub-atomic level then at creator levels every action or non-action is altering everything.  I sense there is a subtle change in my consciousness as I try to take this in; all beyond my intellectual comprehension for sure. 

Peter Matthiessen in his extraordinary story, The Snow Leopard, describes something about the art of Zen practice:
...in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or a flower petal.  When body and mind are one, then the whole being, scoured clean of intellect, emotions, and the senses, may be laid open to the experience that individual existence, ego, the "reality" of matter and phenomena are no more than fleeting and illusory arrangements of molecules. 

Seeing the hawk was a moment of that Zen-like awareness, swept clean of everything, entirely in the fleeting moment, unable to grasp it. Karen knows the names and that brings the hawk to some sort of grounding in Mother Nature, but those assigned names are for convenience sake and do not truly bring to the moment of witness the limits of understanding.